Galaxies are gravitationally bound, large-scale astrophysical systems composed primarily of dark matter, stars, stellar remnants, gas, and dust, often embedded in extended dark matter halos. They exhibit diverse morphologies, including spiral, elliptical, and irregular types, and span mass scales from roughly 10⁷ to over 10¹² solar masses. Their internal dynamics are governed by gravity and angular momentum distribution, with baryonic components organized into disks, bulges, and halos, and frequently hosting central supermassive black holes. Galaxies are fundamental units of cosmic structure formation, participating in hierarchical assembly, mergers, and interactions within larger environments such as groups, clusters, and filaments of the cosmic web.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way's galactic neighbors, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located 160,000 light-years away in the constellations ...
Astronomy
May 16, 2025
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Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have discovered that Cepheid variable stars in our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), are moving in opposing directions along two distinct axes. They found that ...
Astronomy
May 15, 2025
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When I first started working with integral field spectroscopic (IFU) data, I was struck by how much complexity was being averaged out or masked by traditional processing techniques. Most segmentation methods in astronomy—especially ...
The "afterglow" of the universe is an important piece of evidence for the Big Bang. This background radiation also provides important answers to the question of how the first galaxies were able to form. Researchers at the ...
Astronomy
May 9, 2025
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Over the past decade or so, astronomers have speculated about the characteristics of rogue planets in the Milky Way galaxy. These "free-floating" worlds don't orbit stars, but instead roam the spaceways. They're hard to spot ...
Planetary Sciences
May 9, 2025
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Buried deep in the ice in the Antarctic are "eyes" that can see elementary particles called neutrinos, and what they've observed is puzzling scientists: a remarkably strong neutrino signal accompanied by a surprisingly weak ...
General Physics
May 8, 2025
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Astronomers have discovered a likely explanation for a fracture in a huge cosmic "bone" in the Milky Way galaxy, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio telescopes.
Astronomy
May 2, 2025
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Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from the regions around black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it's true. They may not look bright to our eyes, but ...
Astronomy
May 1, 2025
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A team of astronomers and astrophysicists at the Chinese Academy of Science's National Astronomical Observatories has found evidence suggesting that a "gas clump" in a fast-moving cloud in the neighborhood of the Milky Way ...
Using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have discovered 15 new giant radio galaxies with physical sizes exceeding 3 million light years. The finding was reported in a research paper published ...
